Caleb Klaces’ Fatherhood is one of the most vibrant novels I’ve read all year. I reviewed it this week for Splice, in my final review of 2019:
Fatherhood isn’t about [the narrator’s] pursuit of [his life plans] plans in any conventional sense. It is, as above, about the ways in which the travails of raising a newborn child make a glorious, hilarious mockery of a parent’s pretensions to personal dignity. In practice, this means that Klaces surveys two parallel pathways and sets out to follow both of them, alternating from one to the other as the novel unfolds. The first path leads him closer to his wife, the second to his infant daughter, so Fatherhood preoccupies itself with both the comedy of post-parenthood intimacy and the profundity of watching an entirely new identity come into being.
Infinite Patience 